Racial Profiling
 

I'm not sure if there's a thread concerning this already, but this was the hot topic at my family dinner tonight (yes, there ALWAYS has to be debate over dinner...we can never just eat!!)

My entire family is in favor of profiling Arabs at airports and I was the only one who was completely against it (which makes it hard for me, by far the quietest one in my family, to argue)

Does anyone have any opinions on this? My mom says that while its not ideal, intelligent people of Arab descent should understand why they need to be searched extra, while I say its like government sanctioned racism based completely on September 11th, while the majority of terrorism isn't even in this country. (There's a lot more I have to support my opinion too , but I'm just not going to type it all out!!)

The goal of racial profiling is often to stop crime or prevent acts of terror. Of course, racial profiling does not meet that goal. Had it met that goal, it would be used still (well formally accepted anyway).

Mathematically you can prove how racial profiling also doesn't work. Here is a paper that talks about that http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...ract_id=471901

In term of terror, America's ally Israel which faces the most Arab terror does not racially profile. Many Israelis are of different races and thus it would be difficult first of all. Second of all, when you profile then someone will try and beat it by sending in someone that doesn't match the profile - a blonde woman to take a plane hostage for example.

-Rudey

It's a very touchy issue. There are terrorists who are not of Arabic descent, of course. That video that they've been showing recently on CNN on the 9/11 terrorists being taken aside and checked is pretty creepy. Perhaps, if someone did something different, maybe took a little more time, things could have been different. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess, huh? I'm all for taking someone aside if they seem suspicious but searching every single person that looks like they are from the Mid-East is the wrong way to go.

I think if your family members were members of the groups that are racially profiled,their views would be different.

Does anyone know where one could find the statistics on all the terrorist attacks of the past 30 to 40 years and who commited them? Is there an internet site or anything? Anyway, I wanted to get some statistics on them.

You'll have to dig in a lot of sites. Many statistics are very crude and limited. Some only concentrated on radical ISlam, while ignoring other act of terrorisms. Some concentrate on one region only, while other will concentrate on the methods. You'll have to dig into all of them and then add them together.

You took the words out of my mouth.


My sister was recently racially profiled. When the guy interviewing her at the border found out she was muslim, he went asking her stupid questions like do you have terrorists in your family? country of origin? do yuo know anyone against bush? what are their names? what sect of Islam are you? have you been to afghanistan?......when she asked why she was being asked these outlandish questions...they said "its standard". Right? I call that racially profiling.

But if America decides to racially profile everyone (w/o probable cause or the "innocence until proven guilty), then they will waste their time stepping all over all arab-looking persons rights in the U.S, and not hunting down the REAL criminals.

Racial profiling is nothing new. It's Americas way of understanding and reinforcing their ideals of "the others".

"Do you know anyone against Bush?"

What kind of ridiculously vague question is that??!!!

That's the the customs agent at the Toronto airport who asked me if "I wanted to be with this woman?"

I was 13 years old and travelling back from Wisconsin with my mother. The customs agent asked me who the woman was I was with and if I wanted to be with her. I said my mother then looked at him thinking...damn it man, I'm 13 years old, of course I don't want to be with my mother! I'm a teenager I wanted to do everything on my own, what a stupid question! So I figured it was best to tell him I did.

What you say may have merit, but it's not just true of America.

A few years ago, on a bus tour of parts of Europe, while crossing the Swiss border, the only people who had anything more than a cursory passport check was a family of Vietnamese. The rest of the bus were your average white people.

I felt they were treated rather crudely, and the fact that they were being treated to a different standard was obvious.

Other countries solved this problem ages ago and are honkie dorie!

-Rudey

DeltaAlum,

Actually Americans do it in a more visible manner. I'll give you an example:

On Labour day, after a long trip from Toronto, they decided to pull us over at the detroit border. He just looked at us, and pulled us over. Mind you, the majority of the people coming back were Caucasians, but the Customs office was filled to the max with just non-caucasian. Then a bunch of Amish looking folks came in, had no documents with them, and one agent (caucasian) let them go, in front of everybody. Another black agent just went off on the guy, talking about this aint right. At the border, they don't really care how obvious they are of pulling all immigrant-looking folks, even if their documents are right.


I have never gotten pulled over when going back to Canada, not once. And I go every weekend.

Also, racial profiling was all the rage before Sept. 11, and it was the young A.A. males.

That falls into the "must be nice" file.

Do you have any sort of empirical proof other than your story?

-Rudey

Yeah, read a book about racial profiling.

I would recommend "Driving while Black" by Kenneth Meeks. It'll explain it to yah real nice.